18 July 2004	Sunday	29 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON, July 17: The Sept 11 commission's report, due out on Thursday, says Iran may have facilitated the 2001 attacks in the United States by providing eight to 10 Al Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan, US media said on Saturday.

Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, alleged Iran relaxed border controls and provided "clean" passports for the so-called "muscle hijackers" to transit Iran to and from Osama bin Laden's camps between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001.

In addition, The New York Times said the commission's report would recommend creation of a cabinet-level post that would take power from the CIA, FBI, National Security Council and Pentagon to oversee intelligence gathering said to have been lacking before and after the Sept 11 attacks.

The commission's report says Iran at one point proposed collaborating with Al Qaeda on attacks against America, but Osama declined, saying he did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia, according to Time.

Newsweek said the Iranian finding in the commission's report is based largely on a Dec 2001 memo discovered buried in the files of the US National Security Agency.

The memo, according to Newsweek, says "Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of Al Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from (Osama) bin Laden's camps through Iran".

Time said commission investigators "found that Iran had a history of allowing Al Qaeda members to enter and exit Iran across the Afghan border", a practice they said dated back to Oct 2000.

Iranian officials, Time said, issued "specific instructions to their border guards ... not to put stamps in the passports of Al Qaeda personnel and otherwise not harass them and to facilitate their travel across the frontier".

Former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who in a recent book said President George Bush's administration was obsessed with involving Iraq in the attacks and had ignored intelligence on Iran, told Newsweek the commission's report confirms that.

The day after the attacks, Mr Clarke said in his book, Mr Bush told him: "See if Saddam (Hussein) did this. See if he's linked in any way."

Although there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks, Newsweek quoted Mr Clarke as saying "there were lots of reasons to believe (Al Qaeda) was being facilitated by elements of the Iranian security services. We told the president that specifically. The best evidence we had of state support (for Al Qaeda) was Iran".-AFP